


the colour black

by voidlols



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: 2012, Angst, Other, its basically jjust dan talking tbh yikes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 10:11:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5739721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidlols/pseuds/voidlols
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan monologues to himself and contemplates the disaster that his life has become. Set in 2012.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the colour black

**Author's Note:**

> this is completely unedited as i wrote it in a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, almost as vent writing but not quite because it’s still mostly based in dan’s situation. this is purely fictional and it is only my take on how dan might’ve been feeling and thinking at the time.
> 
> [read on tumblr if you like](http://howellaesthetics.tumblr.com/post/137450711227/the-colour-black)

Black. 

Dan had always been fascinated by the colour. It was everything and nothing all at once; it held eternity and yet the most important thing in the universe—light—could not enter it. 

Sometimes it represented emptiness, a kind of lonely of which nothing could compare. Sometimes it represented a crushing presence, though, compressing Dan down into a thin, long _thing_ on the ground, robbing Dan of humanity. Sometimes it was hollow. Sometimes it was overwhelmingly full. 

Dan could relate to the colour black. 

People had often told Dan that he was an emotional person, that he felt too much and handled too little. Dan wasn’t sure whether this was true or not, but he knew that he had some semblance of logic as well. He knew that he _could_ figure things out, probably, if he knew how, he just—didn’t know how. He didn’t know how to handle everything that was being thrown at him. 

At least, not logically. So he reacted the only other way he knew how. Emotionally. 

It was tense for a while. Very tense. Tense with the fans, tense with Phil, tense with everyone. Dan knew that they were walking on eggshells around him; he knew that they were being careful what they said, hoping that he wouldn’t blow up in a swirl of passive-aggressive swearing and biting insults. Dan knew that they were doing this, and yet he never tried to prove them wrong. They should walk on eggshells around him. 

He didn’t know how to control himself that much anymore. 

He found that he was lying to his fans about Phil, found that he was even lying to himself about Phil, and his future, and who he was. He threw himself into Youtube, trying to create a character out of danisnotonfire that distracted him from dealing with his real life problems—his real life problems, like being a college dropout, like losing himself in a vortex of dark existentialism, like cutting off and being distant towards the one person he cared about most.

The future was uncertain, that much was sure. Dan barely knew what would happen the next day—he and Phil were tottering on the edge of one of them moving out, and it could’ve happened at any time that one of them just decided to up and leave. It was that bad. And Dan himself was tottering on the edge of a number of enormous monumental decisions—the most concerning involving certain death, the least concerning involving whether to make that new Youtube video or not. 

Everything seemed so, so fucking pointless. Why should he be wasting his life away wondering what would happen next? But, he didn’t know how to not worry. He didn’t know how to “live in the moment,” as everyone so often told him to do. He didn’t know how to handle the sudden influx of attention from the teenagers on Youtube, the sudden loss of his anchor of support, the sudden need to _protect_ and defend himself from the masses. He didn’t know. 

He didn’t know who he was.

Was he danisnotonfire, the sarcastic, self-depricating character he created as a simultaneous coping mechanism and cry for help? The one who looked down at Phil with an upturned nose, a head above him, surveying him from high up like he was superior in some way? 

Or was he Dan Howell, the smitten young adult that, while still unsure of the future, was optimistic that the world was waiting for him, as long as he had that person next to him? 

Phil. It always led back to Phil. 

Dan would’ve quite liked to have a depressing monologue in his head without it involving Phil for once, thanks. But Phil was entwined in this, like a strand of DNA that made up Dan’s code. Dan’s fucked up code, that seemed to be killing him more than giving him life. 

But was Phil a good strand in his DNA? Or a poisoned one?

Dan’s immediate answer was, of course, poisoned. Phil was holding him back, keeping him from achieving the things he knew he could in his professional career. (It wasn’t Phil’s fault that the fans seemed to like Phan more than Dan and Phil.) Phil and his weird personality were getting in the way of his attempt at branding himself and making a name for himself as danisnotonfire. (It wasn’t Phil’s fault.) Phil was doing nothing to help him through this—he was just sitting there and waiting to see what Dan did next, like the empty desk chair Dan paced by every night. 

(It wasn’t Phil’s fault that he didn’t know what to do.) 

Clearly, Dan had contradicting thoughts about Phil Lester. He—he still felt something for Phil. He was having trouble identifying what it was, because at this point his emotions were so fucked up and jumbled together that he had a hard time deciphering happiness from sadness at this point. 

God, he was _so_ fucked up. Full to the brim and yet empty at the same time. Just like the colour black that he so adored. 

Black, black, black. Dan imagined that he could take all of this—all of his feelings, all of his problems, all of the people in his life—and shove them into the colour black, and just be done with it all for a while. Or forever. What was the difference? Time was a human construct, anyways.

Dan sometimes wondered vaguely if this feeling he was stuck in would last forever. He wondered if, when Phil finally got tired of his bullshit and moved out, he would still be in the same defensive, terrified mental state that he was in now. Would Phil leaving change it? Would anything?

Dan asked himself all of these questions, and yet he recurrently didn’t have any answers to them. What was the point in asking them? They only reminded him of what he didn’t know. 

He didn’t know so much. Everything was unknown. Or maybe he just knew what he didn’t know, and that in itself was knowing, so perhaps he actually knew quite a lot, but nothing that would be useful to him.

Knowing everything and nothing at the same time. 

Dan really saw himself in the colour black. 

\---

 **a/n:** yikes breaking tradition here but if this seemed like it jumped around a lot and was slightly confusing to follow--that’s what it was supposed to seem like. i imagine dan’s head would’ve been very crowded with all of his troubles, and he wouldn’t focus on one issue for too long as he didn’t know how to solve it. 

okay that’s it thank you for reading!


End file.
